


Trust Exercises

by pendrecarc



Category: The Strange Case of Starship Iris (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Loyalty, Missions Gone Wrong, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-30 23:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21436447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: They've been in worse situations. There's really no call for Arkady to jump straight to melodramatic self-sacrifice.
Relationships: Arkady Patel/Sana Tripathi
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Trust Exercises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).

“Shit,” said Arkady, not for the first time. “Shit. This is not how I wanted to do this.”

Sana managed a smile. Closed-lipped, because it made her chattering teeth less obvious. She waved an arm, the gesture taking in the entirety of the shipping container they were floating in. It wasn’t much to look at, especially not in the weak light from Arkady’s emergency power source. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor—or what had been a ceiling and floor under the influence of artificial gravity but were completely indistinguishable without it. Then she pulled her arm back in tight to conserve heat. “I admit this particular situation didn’t figure in any of my mission contingencies.”

“Yeah,” said Arkady. She was looking anywhere but at Sana. “I figured.”

Sana didn’t know how they were getting out of this, but the first step in every plan she’d ever made was keeping her crew calm and functional. She pushed off from the handhold she was clinging to and floated over toward Arkady. “Hey. Look at me.” Arkady’s response to that was a scowl, which wasn’t exactly surprising. Sana bumped lightly into her and anchored herself with a hand on each of Arkady’s shoulders. “We’ve been through worse than this.”

“Have we?”

“I’d say six months of near-starvation after the uprising counts.”

“We won’t starve to death in here. Our oxygen won’t last nearly long enough for that.”

It seemed like the wrong time to discuss the relative dangers of oxygen deprivation, CO2 poisoning, and hypothermia in a poorly-insulated container floating on its own in empty space. “All right—then the time on Xerxes when you nearly bled out after that firefight. That was a closer call.”

“Yeah,” said Arkady again. “But at least that time, I was the only one in any real danger.” Before Sana could object to that way of thinking, Arkady started ticking points off on her fingers. “We’re on completely the wrong side of the system for our rendezvous with the _Rumor_, and Krejjh and Jeeter will have no idea where to start looking. We can’t tell them what happened, because our comms are fried--after we gave them up _voluntarily_ for inspection, since apparently gestures of goodwill trump basic self-preservation when you’re dealing with black-market buyers.” Sana winced. Even if she’d had good reason to believe they were trustworthy black-market buyers planning to use their goods for legitimate healthcare operations, that decision had been ill-advised. But Arkady didn’t give her time to acknowledge this. “I didn’t give up all my weapons because I’m not an _idiot_, but that didn’t do us any good when the buyers realized they couldn’t win a shootout and decided to eject us instead. And it doesn’t do us any good now, because there’s nothing to shoot in here that won’t rupture and expose us to the vacuum of space. Which brings us to the fact that we are even closer to that vast and deadly nothing than usual, and with no life support systems. We’ve got hours, not days.”

“All right,” said Sana, fighting to keep her voice to its usual calm, “you’ve convinced me, this is bad. Now what are we—”

“It’s not you I’m trying to convince.” Arkady sighed, and then she took hold of one of the over-large buttons on her jacket and yanked until the threads gave way.

“What are you doing?”

“Something I was really hoping I’d never have to try.” She put her thumb over the center of the button, the part that had been hidden by fabric, and pushed. For a second nothing happened, and then a little green light started blinking.

“What is that, Arkady?”

“It’s a beacon.”

A general distress call wasn’t the worst idea; they ran some risk of having to explain themselves to the IGR, but they’d talked their way out of regime detention cells before. Arkady’s expression was far too stony for that to be the problem. “All right,” said Sana, “who is it contacting?”

She could feel the tension in Arkady’s shoulders, a tightness that couldn’t be explained by the cold. “You remember when you took me on board, back on Hoffleit VII?”

And maybe it was the cold, after all, because an icy sensation began to work its way through Sana’s veins. She knew the feeling of betrayal all too well. She just hadn’t expected to encounter it here. “You’ve put a call out to a network of arms dealers.”

“It’s not like we have any other choice right now. They have people on most major stations. There’s bound to be someone in hailing distance.”

“You’ve kept a distress beacon to contact your old employers—your old, unprincipled, war-mongering employers—for the last—how long has it been, Arkady? Is it three years now?”

“I was never planning to use it!”

“Why did they even give it to you? Did you tell them you might want to jump ship and go back to your old job?”

“That wasn’t it. Not exactly. I just—contingencies, right? You understand contingencies. I wanted to keep my options open.”

“They always have been open.” If Arkady didn’t understand that, Sana would have to question everything that had happened over those three years. If they weren’t already in zero-G, she’d have felt like the ground was falling out from under her feet. “The moment you want to leave, you tell me, and I figure out how to make it happen. You know that.”

“I do. I just—”

“You don’t trust me,” said Sana, flatly.

By now, Arkady’s face was the farthest thing from stony. Sana had always been a terrible liar, the one whose face was an open book, while Arkady was the con artist. So to see her lose control of her expression was startling. Or it would have been, if Sana'd had the leisure to care about it just then. “I didn’t even know what trust _was_ before I met you. Of course I trust you. That’s not even a question.”

“No, you don’t, not really. You trust me not to screw you over, but you don’t trust my judgment.” Even in the dim light, she was close enough to see that shot hit home. Arkady had to see the truth of it. She’d agree to abide by Sana’s principles, but she didn’t always value them for their own sake. She’d put up with taking on the occasional strays (Dwarnian, linguist, or otherwise), but she hadn’t committed fully to being part of Sana’s crew. Hadn’t worked out what it was to be part of a whole, to make decisions together, and to feel safe in that. Sana could have shaken her, and she might have tried it if she hadn’t known this was at least partly her own fault. It was a captain's responsibility to make her ship a home. “All right, so you’ve called them. Maybe they’ll get the message in time to come pick us up. Then what?”

Arkady began, unbelievably, to relax. “Then you figure out how to contact Krejjh and Jeeter.”

“At which point your friendly neighborhood arms dealers will be satisfied with having saved a couple of lives, and they won’t expect anything in return?”

“They’ll expect repayment.”

Sana’s mental tally of the weeks since their last payday sprang all too readily to mind. “We’ve just offloaded the only items of value we have. I don’t suppose they’d take an interest in political literature?”

She’d been hoping for a smile, but that didn’t get one. “They’ll want repayment in kind. And they’ll want it from me.”

Arkady meant going back to the life she’d been living before they met, when she’d just finished several years’ enforced service in return for the favor that had gotten her off Cresswin Landing in the first place. She meant an indenture.

“No,” Sana said without hesitation. “Turn it off.”

Arkady bit her lip, ducking her head. The hair floating around her face was just long enough to shield her eyes from view. “I can’t. It’s inert until it’s activated—I checked it from top to bottom, believe me, I’d never have brought it aboard the _Rumor_ otherwise—but once it’s on, it’ll keep sending the signal until it’s destroyed.”

“Let me see it.”

Arkady handed it over willingly enough, which was a good sign she didn’t think Sana could do anything with it. She was right. It was a small, clever piece of machinery, without an access panel or even a convenient seam to fit a tool into. Not that Sana had any of her tools handy.

Before she’d quite given up trying, Arkady assured her, “It’s all right. I’ve thought it through, and I’m sure they won’t mind letting you go, not once I’ve signed on with them again.”

Sana could have torn her own hair out. She settled for taking Arkady by the shoulders and giving into the desire to shake her, hard—though as Arkady was the one clinging to a handhold and Sana was the one floating free, the gesture didn’t lend much weight to her argument. “That’s what I’m worried about. Arkady, you can’t go back to that. They don’t care if you live or die.”

“That’s not true,” said Arkady. She sounded genuinely offended. “I was one of their best. They took care of me.”

“And they certainly don’t care _how_ you live. Do you really want to go back to that kind of work? After everything you’ve seen, after everything you’ve been through? You’re worth so much more than that. I know you are, and I hope you do, too.”

“Even if I don’t trust your judgment?”

Her tone was so bitter, so empty, that Sana bit down hard on her lip to keep her composure. It never paid to lose her temper with her crew, especially not in a crisis; and never with Arkady. “If you get me out of this, but you do it by going back to them, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But God, Sana, if I _can_ get you out of this, I don’t care how I have to do it.”

“And that’s why you’re doing this. Not to save yourself, but to save me.”

“Do you really need me to say that?”

“Yes,” Sana replied, very seriously. “I need to know that’s the truth. If it was just you trapped in here, and I was safe back in the _Rumor_—”

“I’d hope like hell you guys had gotten a read on my comm before they killed it, and I’d take my chances with the void.”

“All right. I’m going to trust that you really mean it.” And she set the beacon loose to hover in midair. Then she unholstered the sidearm at Arkady’s hip, flipped off the safety, and fired.

“Oh, _shit_,” said Arkady. This time she didn’t sound distressed. In fact, she almost seemed—delighted?

A second later, though, she was all urgent business, launching herself across the short space to the opposite wall, where a hissing sound suggested the gun had blasted a hole straight through the container’s protective casing. Inevitable damage, but, in Sana’s opinion, worth it. Arkady had taken most of the light with her, so Sana had to grope around for a while until she’d found the beacon, then assess its level of destruction by feel alone. Her fingertips met the uneven surface of a charred processing chip and the sharp edges of raw wire. When she was satisfied it couldn’t continue broadcasting, she tossed it to one side and pushed her way over to where Arkady was cursing at the breach. It wasn’t more than two centimeters wide, at least on the inner surface of the compartment, but that was two centimeters they had to close—and quickly—if they wanted to keep breathing.

“Are you carrying anything impermeable?” Arkady asked, before Sana could say anything. “Damn these organic fabrics, they’re worse than useless. Next time you make us matching jackets, I want mine lined with kevlar and coated in neoprene. We need something rubbery.”

She had a point. The wool blend of their jackets was far from airtight, and the only things they were wearing that might be able to form a seal were their high-topped synth-leather boots. Sana bent down to take hers off. “Here,” she said. Arkady slapped the widest part of the calf over the breach. The whole boot jerked toward the wall, and the sucking sound got abruptly higher and thinner. “Is that holding?”

“It’s not perfect, but it’ll buy us some time.” Arkady closed her eyes. “Shit.” So much for delight.

Sana began to laugh. It was the last thing she should do when they were trying to save their air and reduce CO2 production, but she couldn’t help it. “Time for what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Arkady opened her eyes, the better to glare at the makeshift seal. “To hope for a miracle.”

“So it's just you and me against all the emptiness of space? I don’t mind those odds.” She reached over to twine her bare hands through Arkady’s gloved fingers, then pulled herself in close where it was warmer. “What I mind is finding out you’ve been hedging your bets with me, and that you’d rather throw yourself back to the wolves than give me the chance to sort this out.”

“And how’s that going for you?”

“Not so bad from where I am.” Arkady’s jacket was partly open, gaping where she’d pulled the button out. It was the perfect opportunity to fit a hand in, running her palm along Arkady’s flat, muscular stomach until she could hook it around her waist. “I don’t want to die angry with you.”

“I don’t want you to die at all.”

“But I don’t want to _live_ angry with you, either, or feeling like we have to hide from one another. I don’t expect you to tell me everything. But you can’t do this again.”

“What, try to save your life?” Her voice was a little shaky. It might have been from fear.

“Not at the expense of yours. Not at risk of your integrity, either.”

“My integrity has more holes in it than this compartment does.”

“Arkady,” Sana said, in her best ‘I am the Captain, and sometimes I _do_ give orders, damn it’, voice. “If this is going to work, you need to trust me. And for that matter, I need you to trust Krejjh and Brian, too. We’re a crew, not a collection of free agents.”

Arkady’s eyes fluttered closed again, all the tension flowing out of her at once. “I’ll try. I really will. It doesn’t come easy.”

“I know that.”

“So are you done?”

“For now.”

“Then shut up and kiss me already.”

Energetic making out was probably not an advisable activity in their current circumstances. It helped against the cold, but also led to a steep drop in the air quality. At least, that was one explanation for the weakness in Sana’s knees when some indefinable time later the container shuddered around them and fell to one side. They slid into a corner as the artificial gravity took hold of them, and the boot landed beside them with a thunk.

Arkady’s hands, regrettably, stopped what they’d been doing and went straight to her guns. Sana rubbed her shoulder, which had made abrupt contact with one of the walls, and collected herself. “Who do you think? IGR, your old friends, or our buyers deciding they’d better finish the job?”

“No idea,” said Arkady. “Permission to come out shooting?”

“Let’s get our bearings first. And maybe turn out that light. I’d rather see them before they see us.”

They held their breath together in the dark for another long moment, and then the door cracked open. There was a flood of light and warmth and blessed, life-giving air, and then, best of all—

“Greetings, fellow travelers! At least I’m gonna assume you’re traveling somewhere and not just chilling out in orbit, though I have to say, I question your choice of vehicle. We got a pair of bio-readings off this crate from outside, and I’m _really_ hoping I know who they belong to, because last time we pinged your comms before they stopped working they put your location in this general area—sorry about the pings, I know they weren’t part of the mission parameters, but Crewman Worry-wart here thought it was worth the extra signal traffic since you were going to be gone so long—”

“Hey!”

“_Any_way, for your sakes it’s a good thing we did, even if you aren’t who we think you are, but either way, uh—show yourselves?”

Sana began to laugh again, and in the light from the open door she could see the change in Arkady’s face as she tried, very hard and very unsuccessfully, not to smile.


End file.
